The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Photo credit: Bilal Kamoon

If you follow the SAP blogs at all closely, you’ll know that the past few weeks have been very exciting for SAP. Todd Wilms wrote about SAP 360 Customer and the unveiling of SAP CRM Powered by SAP HANA. Richard Howells expanded on that 360 degree view of the customers’ world and wrote about how a true 360 degree view can put you in a position to know what your customers are thinking even before they do.

I’m looking at all these breakthroughs from a slightly different perspective. When I think about the ability to manage huge volumes of data in real time I think that we’re finally getting to the point where we can start to ask questions that we’ve never dared ask before. I think we’re getting closer and closer to the ability to find the answers to questions we didn’t even know that we should have asked.

And that is a game-changer.

Ask the impossible

I know a woman who was standing at the airport with her young son waiting for his grandmother to arrive. Grandmother always brought gifts and this young man could not bear the suspense of wondering what she might be bringing. So, he borrowed his mother’s iPhone and said, “Siri, what is my grandmother going to bring me when she arrives?”

You smile at this, but is this really just childish naiveté? I would argue that it’s not. Let’s disregard the question of firewalls for a second and recognize that it no longer requires a complete suspension of disbelief to envision smart software determining who that child’s grandmother is, communicating with other services that can identify her shopping habits, and then, from an analysis of recent purchases, discover that she had ordered a set of books from the young readers’ section of Amazon.com.

Question asked, question answered.

The unasked business question If you could ask a smartphone what grandmother is bringing as a gift — and get an answer in seconds — what kinds of “impossible” questions might you ask about your business or your customers? Think of all the questions you have simply never asked your IT department because you know they’d look at you and say “Why would you ever want to know that?” or, even more predictably, “We could probably answer that question, but it will take months.”

With an ability to combine big data, in-memory computing, smart user interfaces, and that 360 degree customer view (including all the transactional and digital social information available) we heard about last week, you’d no longer have to explain why you’d ask this or that question. You’d no longer have to wait months for an answer. You could ask your question, get an answer, and then decide whether the answer warranted further exploration.

So what’s the impossible question you have never asked? And what would it mean to your business if you asked it — and got an answer? ###